Due to continuing power outages in Lower Manhattan, The New School will remain closed until Monday, November 5, therefore this event has been cancelled. Please check the events calendar should this be rescheduled.

Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Urban Policy at the New School and the Julien J. Studley Graduate Program in International Affairs Presents the Fall 2012 conference "Rethinking Politics in Africa: Media, Knowledge Production, Techno- Politics."

This conference organized by Sean Jacobs (GPIA), Manjari Mahajan (GPIA), and Antina von Schnitzler (GPIA), examines how media, knowledge production, and sovereignty are being recast in a post-Cold War Africa marked by new forms of interventions and techno-politics, cultures of legality, and modalities and technologies of representation and circulation.

The continent is frequently depicted as the global exemplar of crisis – ravaged by civil wars, epidemics, and dysfunctional corrupt regimes. In contrast, this conference will explore how Africa, seemingly at the margins of world affairs, is in fact central to understanding new grammars of global governance, novel forms of knowledge production and experimentation, and shifting logics of sovereignty and democratic politics.

Via a series of focused conversations on representation, knowledge production, and the techno-politics of sovereignty, this conference provides a forum to theorize global transformations from historically situated, interdisciplinary inquiries and thus to rethink politics not just on the continent, but more broadly in a postcolonial, post-Cold War world.